Getting Nowhere Fast?

Intrinsic Worth, Utility, and Sense of Place at the Century’s Turn

The spirit, overcome by the weight of quantity, has no longer any other criterion than efficiency.

Simone Weil1

I want to make a distinction between two kinds of settings. The first has a simple name, “homes,” although I will be using the term to refer to a considerably broader category of things than is ordinarily the case. The second kind of setting has no simple name, requiring a longer phrase to designate it: “settings-in-which-we-are-interchangeable-parts” will do.

By “homes,” I mean settings in which we are known and cared for with specific affection: for example, families, households, communities, land we know well, buildings that have been created and maintained with specific care. The “we” here refers first to people, but it could also include “we” animals and plants, even “we” creeks, woods, fields, churches, schoolhouses, local stores: all the possible interdependent ingredients of a community. Creeks with names, the neighbor’s old dog, the south side of a certain hill with its burst of wild flowers, family members, the freshman seminar room in College Hall: all of these are elements of the settings I will call “homes.” I am choosing the term “homes” over other possible terms precisely because of its architectural possibilities. It is a good example of a holistic term, bringing the physical in relation to the social and philosophical.

By “settings-in-which-we-are-interchangeable-parts” I mean the other kind of setting that rapidly began to proliferate in the late twentieth century: “nowhere” is the term James Howard Kuntsler uses to refer to this setting. Malls, highways, and feeder roads, with their industrial-style trees and managed landscapes, head the list. Chain stores -- the Walmarts, Home Depots, Staples, Riteaids, McDonalds, and Denny’s that have replaced local stores everywhere -- are prominent among “nowheres.” Add many schools and colleges today (wherever we find ourselves filling in those ubiquitous ovals), corporate healthcare systems, and computerized telephone systems (where we sit and wait and push buttons). Include banks with no one to talk to, virtually all glass and steel buildings, airlines, and cruise ships. Throw in most of the world of corporate advertising, plus corporate music, corporate sports; also the settings for industrial farming, industrial poultry production, industrial livestock, industrial fish (most of the food industry, taking over for the family farm and husbander’s pastures). Finally, add many settings where one receives “generic” care rather than care with specific affection: corporate hospitals, insurance companies, chain day care centers, and the like. Clearly, the list goes on and on. In these settings we are not known specifically, or cared for specifically. The “we,” again, refers to people, but also to animals, plants, land, and artifacts that are part of these settings. If we are, in a way, cared for, it is only in a non-specific, generic way: the way in which Prudential cares about us, AT&T cares about bringing families together, Archer Daniels Midland cares about the earth, the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania cares about our health, or our political candidates care about “the American people.” In these settings, we are “anyone,” and inhabitants of “anywhere.” We are known by numbers, and our lives are measurable by numbers. We are handled adeptly by new technologies, and we become like cogs in these technologies. There are benefits -- so we are told. We can get more of many things: more and more, “no limits,” of ... something. What? -- Of the products and services of anywhere / nowhere: the mass-produced material products, the packaged entertainment, the packaged education, the glamorous look; more speed, more “information,” quicker communication, greater “efficiency.” All these things rolled together constitute “Value” itself, a ubiquitous, unquestioned kind of multi-purpose equivalent of all worth -- except the kind of worth in the previous paragraph, the worth of homes, families, communities: intrinsic worth.

A crisis of contemporary society seems to lie in the relationship between these two worlds, these two kinds of settings. The two are out of balance, disturbingly and increasingly so. If the home settings are continually diminished, it is clear that something deep is lost, something fundamental concerning who we are and what are we to do. We will first examine the underlying philosophical issue, then come back to sociology and geography.

Bearing significantly on the home / interchangeable parts distinction is an older philosophical distinction between two kinds of ethics. These are usually called “utilitarian” and “deontological.” However, we will use the first term “utilitarian,” but modify the second term to “intrinsic-worth” ethics to broaden its scope. If we were to look at utilitarian and intrinsic-worth ethics in the two leading societies of the turn-of-century world, the United States and Japan, we would find the hegemony of utilitarian ethics, rooted in what I will call “instrumental rationality,” to be virtually unchallenged in the United States and spreading considerably to Japan and other societies; it is increasingly dominant in all major institutions, led by the “neo-liberal” trend in economics. On the other hand, intrinsic-worth ethics, rooted in what we will call “full rationality” and connected to the “wisdom” traditions of most societies, has been largely relegated to the background, forgotten, or marginalized.

A utilitarian approach looks at the consequences of an action to determine its moral worth. An intrinsic worth approach looks at the action itself. The term “utilitarian” comes from the word “utility,” or “usefulness”: the action is useful for something, presumably for producing some kind of pleasure, happiness -- or “Value.” The term “deontological” comes from the Greek deon, duty: the action is good-in-itself, it has intrinsic worth, because it fulfills a standard of justice or rightness that is built into things. The exact way in which this may be “built into things” can, I think, be best described as something of a mystery; but it is a respected, even revered mystery. For many traditions over many generations, much thought, attentiveness, and dialogue have dealt with this mystery.

Let us consider “intrinsic-worth” ethics in a variety of forms from Western and Eastern traditions, focusing on the United States and Japan: Kantian, Platonic, and Christian, from the Western side; and Confucian, Zen and Shinto from the Eastern side.

The cross-cultural unanimity that it is intrinsic-worth ethics, not utilitarian, that constitutes the heart of our moral lives is remarkably clear in traditional thought, East and West. “It is right because it is right” is a possible way of expressing the general form of intrinsic-worth ethics; but the particular variations branching out from such a unity are striking in their diversity, ranging from the strict moralism of some types of Christianity to the gentle naturalism of Lao Tzu’s Taoism. For example, the catalogue description of the required ethics course at Gettysburg College a century ago read, “The student is conducted through an examination of utilitarianism and other rejected theories to an immutable basis of truth in the nature of God.”2 At the other extreme, the portrayals of a Taoist Master in the Tao Te Ching convey an unforced, flowing way to inherent goodness: e.g., “Because he has no goal in mind, everything he does succeeds”; or, “Because she has let go of herself, she is perfectly fulfilled.”3

For our purposes, we are interested in seeing how the Kantian, Platonic, Christian, Zen, Confucian and Shinto perspectives each provide entrance from a different side into intrinsic worth. To approach this issue, assume, for the moment, that there are hidden moral truths, intangibles, beneath or deep within our world. Next, consider that there might be different paths, which are suited for different people.

Immanuel Kant has one approach, a moralistic approach characterized words like “duty” and “obligation.” It appeals to some, but may repel others (feminists, most notably among recent critics). His approach is reason- and will-oriented, as opposed to feelings- and consequences-oriented. It gives us rules of universal obligation. The most famous rules, variations of the so-called “categorical imperative,” are, roughly translated, “One ought only to act such that the principle of one’s action could become a universal law in a world in which one would hope to live,” and, “One ought to treat others as having intrinsic value in themselves, not merely as a means to achieve one’s ends.” Overall, Kant sketches out for us the glowing possibility of a world one might call the “kingdom of ends,”a better world, a fully ennobling human world, that, paradoxically one arrives at precisely by not paying attention to consequences. The moral law that leads toward such a world deserves our reverence, Kant points out. We revere and follow the law, and as for “consequences”? -- We trust things will work out for the best.

Lurking beneath Kant’s perspective is a moral metaphysic that there are hidden foundations, eternal, perfect, unchanging truths, built into our world. It is the Platonic perspective that most clearly makes the case for the existence of such hidden moral things. The side of intrinsic worth that Plato illuminates is mystical, dialogical and metaphysical. In his famous doctrine of Forms, Plato asserts that there are primordial archetypes, like beacons to us, such as Wisdom, Justice, and Beauty. We can draw close to these through strenuous communal thinking (dialogue or dialectic); yet these truths are ultimately beyond words, and we may need a kind of mystical intuition finally to grasp them. These goods are good for their own sake; the good consequences that may flow from them come as a kind of bonus. From the hidden world, therefore, we derive our meaning in this world; the faint glimmerings we see of that deeper world are our real guides to how we are to live our lives, rather than our own calculations as to how to get to certain consequences. And we need to approach the task with a sense of humility, awe, and lifelong learning.

The Christian approach to intrinsic-worth ethics has a similarity in terms of the cultivation of humility, but is more distinctively characterized by the sense of a divine “Other,” and by the qualities of “holiness” and “mystery.” A repeated theme in various intrinsic-worth ethics is that this mode of thinking is not calculating, does not move in a controlled way toward outcomes, but rather involves a recognition that in an important sense outcomes are out of one’s own control. This aspect is most clearly captured in the Christian perspective by such phrases as “Thy will be done,” and, “Results are up to God.” In this tradition, what we experience when we try to act rightly, not from our own utilitarian standards but from a deeper standard, is too profound to be contained within our everyday worldly language; so we find other words --Lord, God, Yahweh -- to convey our sense of contingency, as well as our openness and humility. In this process, we are seeking what is holy, i.e. what is pure and whole -- not that which just appears “good” by some partial reckoning, but that which is good overall, and for which we hunger. This holy dimension of intrinsic-worth ethics is, in Catholicism, embodied in the ritual of the Eucharist. The ritual is performed not for any utilitarian reasons, but because while we are partaking of the holy communion we are for a short time doing something pure, good and true. It is self-justifying and self-referential. For a moment we are not separate from God. Other actions in life that can move even a little in the direction of this self-contained goodness of the Eucharist become thereby more sacred, more in tune with the wholeness of the original Creation. And of course all of this is a mystery, for we cannot fully understand it with our minds, but need to embrace it with our whole beings. From the Catholic perspective, we only become what we truly are when we partake of the communion. Finally, we are fully present.

It is this notion of presence that can provide the bridge that takes us from West to East. The Buddhist tradition of intrinsic worth, extending from Siddhartha Gautama in India to Zen in Japan, teaches presence, or full awareness, of the intrinsic nature, or “suchness,” of each moment. Buddhism detects that we tend to keep passing over the here and now, sacrificing it, instrumentalizing it in order to get to something else. When we do so, we cut off life, don’t really live it. What we need to do is come back from our expectations, calculations, and ambitions, and recover the only real ground we have: our presence. “When you eat, eat.” “When you walk, walk.” When you attend to another person, or an animal, or a plant, be fully there, attentive ... present. Never do things merely for the sake of something else; try to fill more and more of your life doing things for their own sake; do nothing that isn’t self-referentially good. Such are the advisements of Buddhism that are most emphasized in its distinctively Japanese form, Zen. This is the Zen side of intrinsic-worth ethics.

The Confucian approach to intrinsic worth calls attention to another side of “presence”: being fully what one is socially. The Confucian side is characterized by words like “community,” “neighborhood,” “family,” and “tradition.” From the Confucian perspective, we are reminded that our being is social. Therefore in seeking what is good or right we need to consider what we are as sons and daughters, sisters and brothers, parents and teachers -- as grandchildren who will one day be grandparents. We are called to act in a way that bears witness to our social being through re-creating and renewing it. An action is good when it represents who we are, and not primarily because of its consequences. Our guidance comes from those who have gone before us and left their examples: holistic patterns of trying to find the balance, hit the mark, walk the path, or Tao. Scholar / teachers provide special leadership in trying to study and transmit this. Students are called to learn in a holistic way, not simply extracting from a lesson what seems of utilitarian value to them. Confucius reminds us in Analects 2, “A scholar is not a thing of use,” i.e. liberal arts learning is a whole, involving investigation of roots as well as branches, including all premises or foundations -- it is not just “information” to be cut into pieces according to one’s own limited objectives.

Finally we get to Shinto. For the Japanese, Shinto, being Japan’s indigenous world view, provided historically the perspective from within which “sides” of Buddhism and Confucianism were selectively appropriated. The Japanese took mainly the “living” side of Buddhism, for example, stressing presence more than non-attachment; and the “neighborhood” side of Confucianism, emphasizing particularity more than universality. As for Shinto itself, its “take” on intrinsic-worth is perhaps best characterized by the words “vitality” and “place.” If we remember how Kant’s approach put emphasis on the moralistic, Shinto’s approach is almost the opposite. In Western terms it is more akin to Nietzsche’s critique of Kant’s (possibly deadening) morality on behalf of life. In Shinto, one honors vitality: in nature, in aesthetics, in the generations. From baths to Tori gates, from forest glens to the perpetually new Ise Shrine, Shinto cultivates an appreciation of specific places: local rocks and trees, wind and rain, mountains and forests, as well as the generations of people passing on local nature and culture. Gods (kami) are present everywhere; they are specific to every location. There is a special divinity in this waterfall, in that estuary, in yonder bending pine. Honoring that which passes on life is the first requirement of our actions in Shinto. Utilitarian interests, once again, can only be secondary.

Our purpose in briefly examining intrinsic-worth ethics through these six diverse lenses has been to establish their unity around mainly one point: that at the deepest level utilitarian or instrumental thinking is too impoverished, too shallow and partial, for providing the wisdom we need to live. Our ancestors both East and West send us back repeatedly to “being present where we are” and to “doing right because it is right” -- back from being away somewhere in our utilitarian absent-mindedness.

Now we may proceed to study the nature of utilitarian ethics, or “instrumental rationality,” particularly how it is used today, for this kind of thinking is pervasive, in many areas virtually unchallenged, in the turn-of-century ethos. Few Americans today may use the term “utilitarian” to describe their moral thinking, yet a one-sidedly utilitarian ethos has slipped in during the last quarter century to the point where it now prevails unreflectively over a broad range of American life, ranging from the social sciences, to the economy, to education.

Although utilitarianism, as expounded early in the modern era by David Hume and John Stuart Mill, may have attempted to frame utilitarian thinking in the broadest possible way, including not only narrow calculation for economic profit or material pleasure, but also more sensitive pleasures of mind and spirit, nevertheless over the years the problem with utilitarian thinking has been that it seems repeatedly to veer toward narrowing human endeavor to what all-too-humans themselves deem as profitable or pleasurable. There is perhaps no a priori reason why utilitarian thinking could not, theoretically, yield as rich and diverse an ethos as intrinsic-worth thinking, perhaps including even a sensitivity to gods, the divine, the hidden, etc.; yet the fact is that the utilitarian way of directing one’s attention toward consequences rather than toward the thing itself tends to create a kind of habit of using one thing as an instrument to get to another, of using one moment for the next; or, to borrow language from Marx, sacrificing real value for market exchange value -- and by that route, one soon discovers that life has been sacrificed to an idol. Utilitarian thinking ends up contributing to the genesis of the ubiquitous “Value,” something we previously mentioned and which might be defined as wealth, power, educational success and sex appeal rolled into one and now standing above and against real human life as its new standard of measurement.

Think of the things everybody talks about today as important. Especially consider education and business: things like “acquiring skills,” “setting personal goals,” “investing time,” “achieving measurable outcomes,” “becoming a success,” “developing leadership,” and “managing resources.” Add in typical contemporary buzz words like “growth,” “no limits,” “enhanced life style,” “personal freedom,” “diversity,” “change,” and “the future.” Such phrases are tossed around constantly in turn-of-century America. They have even seeped out into Japan and the rest of the world. Note that this is entirely a utilitarian terminology. None of these words refers to a good-in-itself. None refers to intrinsic worth. None provides a full context or content that would make one able to evaluate an activity morally. In fact, in an important sense, all of these are either morally ambiguous -- they could actually be good or bad, depending on the context -- or morally noxious. The latter is possible because many of them deflect one’s attention away exactly from presence, from the right-in-itself, from holism. They counsel the partial, encourage only limited vision, as if to say: “Open your eyes only so far.”

The utilitarian revolution has changed what up to a generation ago we had meant by the word “thinking,” at least in liberal arts contexts. It has narrowed the meaning from what we might call “full thinking,” to “partial thinking.” Instrumental reason has replaced full reason. In full reason, one thinks about everything. Reflection upon premises and foundations is always appropriate and in fact is the mark of worthy thought. Reflective thought is inherently interesting, challenging, important. Instrumental thinking is reason used only for some preconceived objective, which itself is excluded from the realm of questioning. Therefore, we get the ironic situation, again and again at the turn of the century, that the most “successful” of our young adults may be making smarter and smarter decisions, yet making the world worse and worse. They may be “growing the economy,” but at the same time damaging local communities and the environment. They may be figuring out how to ace SAT tests and enhance their portfolios, yet be incapable of noticing the multi-layered richness of a Bach violin concerto, a Platonic dialogue, or a Flannery O’Connor short story. They are “successes” in a world measurable in quantities, a world that is seamlessly compatible with new computer technologies; but being raised on television commercials, SAT-prep courses, polls, and outcomes assessments, they have been left more hollow than educated people were a generation ago. Their “success” is measured only within the confines circumscribed by the intersecting spheres of high-tech, corporate market economy, and neo-liberal ideology. Outside those confines, according to more perennial measures of what a good human being is, such as exercising the wisdom to harmonize within the natural world or to sustain and transmit families and communities, many “successful” young people seem distressingly impoverished. Some are even aware of it.

The popular rationale as to why most of us turn-of-century people do not talk about overall goals, fundamental questions, or “highest goods” is that such matters should be left “up to the individual,” are matters of “personal choice.” According to the prevailing ideology, society’s leadership should go only so far as to sweep away barriers to anyone getting an equal opportunity to compete. Compete for what? -- For market “goods,” naturally, including material wealth, real estate, education, power, fame, pleasure. Moreover, the prevailing ideology is committed to keeping away all barriers that could impede those who have already accumulated great quantities of such Value from using their acquisitions freely. The pervasiveness of one-sidedly utilitarian approaches to ethics has contributed to this vacuum, by narrowing thinking from whole to partial, by pointing us toward quantity, and by cutting us off from the richness in our traditions.

Finally, we are ready to return to the socio-geographical distinction with which we began: settings that are “homes” versus settings-in-which-we-are-interchangeable-parts. I want to argue that homes draw us toward intrinsic-worth ethics, and that the practice of intrinsic-worth ethics is a necessary part of the conditions that make a place a home. Settings in which we are interchangeable parts are, on the other hand, the places where utilitarian ethics thrive. Other, more traditional modes of thinking seem to vanish there -- they lose their ability to justify themselves, seem “unscientific,” not “measurable.”

I have been awakened to the sociology of place most of all by the writings of Wendell Berry, the Kentucky poet, essayist and farmer who starts from the kind of local and regional sense of place that most of us, even if we are sensitive to the issue, can only tap through memory and imagination. Berry defines community as “the commonwealth and common interests ... of people living together in a place and wishing to continue to do so”; or, in other words, an “interdependence of local people, local culture, local economy, and local nature.” He adds that “community, of course, is an idea that can extend itself beyond the local, but it does so only metaphorically,” and that “the idea of a national or a global community is meaningless apart from the realization of local communities.”4

It is with such a definition of community that we can begin to reclaim a more holistic understanding of economy. Berry writes primarily about the economy of the household, community and region. He observes that “the destruction of community begins when its economy is made ... subject to a larger external economy.”5 Berry proceeds to note many things that are damaged when the larger industrial economy triumphs over community: “the care of the old, the care and education of children, family life, neighborly work, the handing down of memory, the care of the earth, respect for nature and the lives of wild creatures.” He concludes that most precious of all the damaged is perhaps sexual love, which he describes as “the heart of community life -- the force that in our bodily life connects us most intimately to the Creation, to the fertility of the world, to farming and the care of animals.” In the industrial economy, he notes, “sexual energy is made publicly available for commercial use.”6

Berry gives us a history of Luddism as an illustration of resistance by local people to becoming subjects of a larger external economy. He insists that the Luddites’ nineteenth century example is again relevant, that settled communities today, such as his own in Henry County, Kentucky, would be well advised to familiarize themselves, as the Luddites did, with the colonialist principles by which their lives are being uprooted: for example, “the assumption that it is permissible to ruin one place for the sake of another”; and that the economic prosperity of nations is measured by “the burgeoning wealth of industrial interests, not according to the success or failure of small local economies.” He notes that the global economy today does not exist “to help the communities and localities of the globe. It exists to siphon the wealth of these communities and place it into a few bank accounts.” He calls the global economy a “totalitarian economy” and notes that it triumphs with the aid of an ideology one might call “technological determinism.” He adds that this is usually mixed with rhetoric of national mysticism about “our destiny” and “the future,” but that it really amounts to a denial of democracy and self-determination.7

Berry’s perspective has its own tradition, most notably flowing out of the 1972 classic Small Is Beautiful by E. F. Schumaker. Berry’s principle that we should be doing “everything possible to provide ordinary citizens the opportunity to own a small, usable share of the country”8 echoes Schumaker’s earlier suggestion that in a holistically healthy economy, the average amount of capital for establishing a workplace should be no more than the annual earnings of an able and industrious working person.9 Schumaker observes that such visions of a world composed of human-scale local and regional economies are usually called “uneconomic” by the “realistic” practitioners of the new “science” of economics. He adds, “In the current vocabulary of condemnation there are few words as final and conclusive as ‘uneconomic.’ If an activity has been deemed uneconomic, its right to existence is not merely questioned but energetically denied.”10 Thus are swept away virtually all practices passed down through the generations such as horticulture, husbandry, artisanship, and small industries and businesses of diverse kinds.

However, the word “economic” used in such a way involves an “extremely fragmentary judgement,” Schumaker continues. “Out of the large number of aspects which in real life have to be seen and judged together before a decision can be taken, economics supplies only one -- whether a thing yields a profit to those who undertake it or not.” In other words, the word “economic” as employed by its scientific-sounding practitioners these days does not normally look at “whether an activity carried on by a group within society yields a profit to society as a whole.”11 Damage that is inflicted on other parts of the natural or social environment is not included. Such damage is hidden from view as “externalities.”

On the other hand, Berry, by starting with community, is able to avoid this unrealistic use of the term “economic,” for at the community level that part of community life called “economy” is embedded in local nature, culture and people. Community economy cannot “succeed” if the rest falls to ruin. What is apparent from ground level, however, is little noticed from the heights of the multinational corporate towers: the possibility of a thriving “economy” while local nature and culture almost everywhere are destroyed is a commonplace assumption in the kind of partial reasoning used by non-holistic economists.

Berry expresses the “scale” issue in terms of affection. Small scale means places, things, plants and animals can be watched over with specific affection, but as scale grows beyond a certain point everything becomes interchangeable parts. “Land cannot be properly cared for by people who do not know it intimately,” he writes, adding that the quality of the attention decreases as the acreage increases and as the level of absenteeism increases.12 At the scale of what is today called “global thinking,” local nature and local culture appear only statistically; intrinsic worth is replaced by utilitarian calculation. Land, forests, water, air become “resources.” Even people become “human resources.” There is no specific affection implied in the term “resource.”13

Berry suggests that the plain term “good work” can help us here.14 We know, or at least have a cultural memory of, what “good work” is. Berry cites his late husbander-neighbor Henry Besuden’s daily work of saddling up in the early morning to “see the bloom,” by which he meant check on the “a certain visible delectability” of the pastures where his sheep would be grazing that day. “He recognized it, of course, by his delight in it.... He was not interested in ‘statistical indicators’ of his flock’s ‘productivity.’”15 At the consumer end, if we eat this lamb or use this wool, we are aware of completing a process about which we can approve. The whole is good -- the beginnings of holiness. The entire process from production to consumption embodies what we have earlier called “intrinsic worth.” It also includes, Berry notes, a wonderful sense of pleasure, even when the work is difficult.

Contrast this with the settings for industrialized meat production, and the jobs provided in the mechanized and computerized handling of meat animals. This is a prime example of “bad work.” “The name of our present society’s connection to the earth is ‘bad work,’” Berry observes, “work that is only generally and crudely defined, that enacts a dependence that is ill understood, that enacts no affection and gives no honor.” He admits that we cannot avoid doing some bad work today, or having it done by other people for us. But he adds, “There is much good work to be done by every one of us and we must begin to do it.”16

A bad work epidemic might be a good description of the globe-sweeping process George Ritzer describes in his book The McDonaldization of Society. This is production organized not in the holistic way that Berry describes but in accordance with the principles of “efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control.”17 Ritzer traces the genesis of this approach from early modern bureaucracies as studied by Max Weber, through Taylorism, Ford-style assembly lines, Levittowns, and the “malling of America,” to the McDonaldization of everything from fast food to health care. With narrowly utilitarian thinking, the help of the latest technologies, and what Adbusters magazine aptly calls a very favorable “habitat,” McDonaldized corporate production has given us a deluge of consumer goods. “With no natural enemies, corporations have grown and thrived,” Adbusters editors explain…. These companies buy and sell each other’s stocks and shares, lobby legislators, bankroll elections, run our air waves, set our economic and cultural agendas….” In the beginning, they add, humans were in control of the relationship with corporations, which could be dissolved simply by having their charters revoked. Yet now it has been a hundred years since this power has been used.18 As products and services have become increasingly mass-produced, disposable redundancies, so have people become mass-produced, disposable redundancies. We have also become accomplices in our own subjugation, as we let more and more of our money work its way toward distant coffers – instead of keeping it as long as possible in local communities, as Berry suggests.

One objection that liberals often make to Berry’s thinking is that it might lead to a revival of parochialism and bigotry. His answer to this objection is his call for a “pluralism of settled communities,” an important concept that links Berry’s localism with an alternative view of the global picture. He points out that the current rhetoric of multiculturalism and globalism actually works against settled communities, because it amounts to a destruction of local culture and nature even as it gives “equal opportunity” to individual Native Americans, Mexicans, Thais, etc. to find jobs or pursue profits in the corporate monoculture. In other words, there are third world counterparts to Henry County, Kentucky around the globe. For example, Quaker activists George and Lillian Willoughby, returning in early 1998 from conferences in Thailand on “Alternatives to Consumerism” and “Self-reliance,”report that resistance is growing to a future of “one borderless mass with no economic barriers.” The “Alternatives to Consumerism” conference resolution called for “a restored earth with healthy children, vibrant and creative communities, and valued elders.” The “Self-reliance” gathering involved sharing local knowledge that could help to build resistance to “people coming in with offers or big money and jobs.” For example, “Anita, from Sri Lanka, told of a commercial soft drink company advertising a new drink. To counter this, Anita and a group of women treated church and other groups with the delicious and healthy drink made from the common hibiscus flower, and provided the recipe which helped popularize the hibiscus drink.”19

Finally, I want to relate Berry and Ritzer’s work to the sociology of landscape architecture developed by James Howard Kuntsler in The Geography of Nowhere. The terms community, place, affection, good work, and human scale, as well as the resistance to McDonaldization, all come up from a slightly different angle in Kuntsler’s writings. Kuntsler traces how Americans, through a century of increasing architectural and town-planning amnesia accompanied by automobile addiction, have lost our sense of place, have forgotten our understanding of the interconnectedness of architecture and community and our ability to create buildings worthy of affection.

Kuntsler writes about Long Island, Saratoga Springs and Schuylerville, New York, but his principles, from which we derived our homes / settings-in-which-we-are-interchangeable-parts framework, might well be illustrated by an example taken from my home state of New Jersey. In Burlington and Camden counties where I live and frequent, there are two distinctively different architectural patterns, each of which implies a way of living. One is classically small town: places like Riverton, where I live, Palmyra, Moorestown or Haddonfield. These towns are constructed as civic places. Their elements include sidewalks, front porches, and back alleys rather than front garages and driveways; what one might call “civic trees,” providing a canopy along boulevards; Main Street-type downtown areas with locally owned shops built out to the sidewalks; a central square with benches and gardens; architectural focal points like city hall, churches, the post office, a bandstand, sometimes a train station, and not far away the public school. Even the old local city, Camden, now severely damaged by urban blight, shows many of these same architectural and civic elements.

These towns – there are several dozen of them in Burlington and Camden counties alone – constitute settings I call “homes.” They are places, not “anywheres” or “nowheres.” At their best they are constructed in ways that honor local nature. The architectural patterns in these towns thrust one out into public life, in a gentle, civilized way – not that there is no privacy, but that too is part of a civic design. Housing was originally designed to provide for a variety of income levels interspersed with each other, including apartments over stores or businesses.

Some towns have managed to stay somewhat protected from the ravages of the automobile, the symbol of the different pattern found all around them. In this other pattern, everything is automobile-oriented. These places have names like Cherry Hill, Mt. Laurel, Cinnaminson, and Marlton. Freeways and highways crisscross them. Getting off of these highways, one finds various feeder roads that lead to malls, strip malls, convenience stores, industrial and office parks, and housing developments; each of these sectors is segregated from the others so that it would be difficult, if not fearful, for a person to walk from one to another. Businesses are not built out to the sidewalk, but have large parking lots in front of them. The architecture of the vast majority of buildings is a modification of a box-with-a-sign. Civic buildings are not much different. Schools, which can only be reached by car or school bus, have a cinderblock factory look. Houses are set back from sidewalk-less streets. Front porches are gone, and instead there are private decks in the back. The most prominent feature on the front of the house is the two-car garage, projecting a blank face to passer-byes and a signal that any link between life inside that house and the outside world will be via the car (or telephone, or internet). Interspersed in this pattern is another arrangement called by names like “Meadow View” or “Fox Run,” described by Robert Bellah as a “lifestyle enclave” rather than a community in the full sense.20 Here people of homogeneous income levels and consumption preferences are grouped together and separated from the outside world, including from civic life. Most of the land not landscaped into towns many years ago but left open as orchards, farms, and woods is now being converted to this second pattern for living. This is the pattern we have called “settings-in-which-we-are-interchangeable-parts.”

In conclusion, the homes / interchangeable parts distinction, and its derivation from the philosophical distinction between intrinsic worth and utility, has implications that spread beyond matters of geography, land use, and place. The analogies in education, for example, are striking. “Homes” become by analogy educational situations in which the student is specifically known through writing, speech, and conversation, and is recommended for higher studies by personal letters passed between people who know each other. The teacher is also specifically known by the administrators as a bearer and propagator of intellectual and moral judgement, of character, and of personality, and as embedded within a community that is relatively permanent. On the other hand, “interchangeable parts settings” become by analogy educational situations in which students are known primarily by objective test scores, GPAs, and SATs, that greatly determine life chances through their influence on admissions and scholarship procedures which work mechanically and anonymously. Students are known primarily as intersections of sets of numbers rather than as creators of essays and bearers of character and personality. Other fields, too – health care, for example – witness parallel developments that need to be critiqued in terms of the distinction between the intrinsic worth of “homes” and the utility of “interchangeable parts.”

However, the application to geography seems primary, in that the loss of “home” here affects the landscape in which all else takes place. The loss affects humans’ basic relationship with nature and with cultural tradition reflected in place. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, some awareness of this primacy of geography and the importance of “home” seems to have taken root in the culture. A flourish of new books – Cities and Natural Processes by Michael Hough (1995), Ecological Design by Sim Van der Ryn and Stuart Cowan (1996), The Ecology of Place by Timothy Beatley and Kristy Manning and Sustainability and Cities: Overcoming Automobile Dependence by Peter Newman and Jeffrey Kenworthy (1999) – have become essential reading in cities, landscape architecture, regional planning, historic preservation and environmental studies programs. Moreover, the above fields have all begun to link up with each other, becoming one large interdisciplinary cause that is attracting more and more students.

The work of James Howard Kuntsler, George Ritzer and Wendell Berry in the early 1990s has been absorbed and turned into a catalyst for new levels of holistic understanding of the habitat for life. The environmental movement, the simplicity movement and the anti-corporate globalization movement have attracted more dissenters away from the dominant ideology of growth and interchangeable parts. “Seattle 1999” and “Quebec City 2001” have become symbols of a new gestalt that is slowly taking shape, with its alternative visions of bicycles and hybrid vehicles, solar power and fuel cells, return to towns and disillusionment with sprawl, and renewal of family and community in new inclusive ways.

Kuntsler’s Geography of Nowhere, having sparked much productive discussion, has more recently been critiqued for its envisioning the future too narrowly in terms of the architectural movement called New Urbanism, or Traditional Neighborhood Design. This model emphasizes laying out of new areas as towns rather than sprawl, but when conceived too narrowly New Urbanism can serve builders’ interests more than society’s if it neglects to give sufficient attention to social justice and ecological impact issues. An alternative emphasis that some are embracing is on the renewal of decaying and ecologically damaged old cities, such as in my own area Camden, New Jersey, which has many of the elements of traditional neighborhood design but is now broken, with boarded-up row houses and contaminated brownfields. Meanwhile, nearby Philadelphia is experimenting with restoration of urban meadows in parks, emphasizing native grasses rather than lawns.21

Ritzer’s McDonaldization of Society has also sparked a second round of books, including most notably No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies by Naomi Klein, a centerpiece for the anti-globalization movement.

Finally, Wendell Berry has sparked more Wendell Berry. His Life Is a Miracle (2000) draws deeply into the well of Western and regional American culture to argue that mind cannot be abstracted from body and place, an argument reminiscent of Heidegger’s in his seminal essay “Building, Dwelling, Thinking.” And in Berry’s 1996 essay, “Conserving Communities,” he prophesizes the emergence of a more genuine two-party system in America with the arising of a party of local community to oppose the Republican-Democrat corporate party. Point nine of his proposed party platform brings this political vision home to intrinsic worth and family life. “See that the old and the young take care of one another,” he advises. “The young must learn from the old, not necessarily and not always in school. There must be no institutionalized childcare and no homes for the aged. The community knows and remembers itself by the association of old and young.”22

Notes

1. Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (New York: Routledge, 1963), 140.

2. Dennis O’Brien, “The Disappearing Moral Curriculum,” The Key Reporter 62, no. 4 (summer 1997): 1-2.

3. Stephen Mitchell, Tao Te Ching (New York: Harper, 1988).

4. Wendell Berry, Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community (New York: Pantheon, 1993), 119-20.

5. Wendell Berry, Sex, Economy, 126.

6. Wendell Berry, Sex, Economy, 133-36.

7. Wendell Berry, Sex, Economy, 126-32.

8. Wendell Berry, Sex, Economy, 17.

9. E. F. Schumaker, Small Is Beautiful (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), 35.

10. E. F. Schumaker, Small, 41.

11. E. F. Schumaker, Small, 43.

12. Wendell Berry, Sex, Economy, 3-37.

13. Wendell Berry, Sex, Economy, 19-20.

14. Wendell Berry, Sex, Economy, 35-36.

15. Wendell Berry, What Are People For? (New York: North Point, 1990), 140-41.

16. Wendell Berry, Sex, Economy, 35-37.

17. George Ritzer, The McDonaldization of Society (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Pine Forge, 1996), 9-11.

18. “Editorial,” Adbusters, July 1998, 1.

19. George and Lillian Willoughby, unpublished newsletter (Deptford, N. J., 1998), 1-3.

20. Robert N. Bellah et al, Habits of the Heart (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), 335.

21. Elisa Ung, “Driving Nature Back to Nature,” Philadelphia Inquirer, 5 November 2000, 1-2(B).

22. Wendell Berry, “Conserving Communities,” in The Case Against the Global Economy, ed. Mander, Jerry, and Goldsmith, Edward (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1996), 407-417.

Selected Bibliography

Beatley, Timothy, and Manning, Kristy. The Ecology of Place. Washington D.C.: Island, 1996.

Bellah, Robert N., et al. Habits of the Heart. New York: Harper and Row, 1985.

Berry, Wendell. Life Is a Miracle. Washington D.C.: Counterpoint, 2000.

---. Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community. New York: Pantheon, 1993.

---. What Are People For? New York: North Point, 1990.

Breton, Denise, and Largent, Christopher. The Soul of Economies. New York: Idea House, 1991.

Brown, Delmer M., ed. The Cambridge History of Japan. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Farrell, David, ed. Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings. New York: Harper, 1991.

Gardels, Nathan P. At Century’s End. La Jolla, Calif.: ALTI, 1996.

Hough, Michael. Cities and Natural Processes. New York: Routledge, 1995.

Klein, Naomi. No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies. New York: St. Martin’s, 2000.

Kuntsler, James Howard. The Geography of Nowhere. New York: Touchstone, 1993.

Legge, James. Confucian Analects, Great Learning and Doctrine of the Mean. New York: Dover, 1971.

Mander, Jerry, and Goldsmith, Edward. The Case Against the Global Economy. San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1996.

Marx, Karl. Capital, Volume One. New York: Vintage Books, 1977.

Merton, Thomas. Zen and the Birds of Appetite. Boston: Shambhala, 1993.

Mitchell, Stephen. Tao Te Ching. New York: Harper, 1988.

Newman, Peter, and Kenworthy, Jeffrey. Sustainability and Cities. Washington D.C.: Island, 1999.

O’Brien, Dennis. “The Disappearing Moral Curriculum.” The Key Reporter 62, no. 4 (summer 1997): 1-2.

Ritzer, George. The McDonaldization of Society. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Pine Forge, 1996.

Schumaker, E. F. Small Is Beautiful. New York: Harper and Row, 1973.

Ung, Elisa. “Driving Nature Back to Nature.” Philadelphia Inquirer, 5 November 2000.

Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace. New York: Routledge, 1963.

Willoughby, George and Lillian. Unpublished newsletter. Deptford, N.J., 1998.